


Hawkeye

by angelaiswriting (carolinemoore)



Series: Larisa [3]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Bad Dirty Talk, Dark Past, Dirty Thoughts, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Flirting, Implied Sexual Content, Mentions of Death, Oral Sex, Public Sex, Semi-Public Sex, Sexual Content, Sexual Tension, Slow Burn, Unresolved Sexual Tension, blowjob, mentions of female sterilization, mentions of killing, mentions of manipulation, mentions of torture, non-described fem!OC, public oral sex, thigh riding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-11
Updated: 2019-04-11
Packaged: 2020-01-11 09:43:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18427988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carolinemoore/pseuds/angelaiswriting
Summary: For ten years now, Clint Barton has been Larisa Goncharova’s greatest fantasy. And now that they’re both sent on an undercover mission together, she doesn’t miss her chance to pay him back for the way he’s made her feel at Stark’s charity event.





	Hawkeye

**Author's Note:**

> You can also read this on my tumblr, angelaiswriting.tumblr.com :)
> 
> Translations (I'm used to another translitteration system, so I apologize if there are mistakes in these translits):  
> Shokoladny soldat = Chocolate Soldier  
> Izvestnyj Bogomol? = The famous Mantis?  
> Drug? = Friend?  
> Muzh = Husband  
> \+ ЧРВД stands for (in my fic obv) “Чёрная вдова” (Black Widow)

**HAWKEYE**  

 

A month had passed since Tony Stark’s charity event and Larisa had seen Clint more than she ever had in the previous ten years. It was a great step forward, but also ten steps back as her mind kept on wandering back to his mouth on her, lips latched around her clit as he fingered her slowly.

Nasha often joked about it, but what Nasha didn’t know was how Clint’s burning tongue had felt on her, nor how often or how ardently she had imagined him kneeling between her legs with his face buried against her.

Even now, as she stared at his back from the other end of the recruits’ training room in the main SHIELD facility, she could barely focus on something that was not the aching between her legs. It didn’t matter that her muscles were sore from the intensity of the workout she had had with Nasha, nor that sweat was dripping down her spine, spreading the uncomfortable sensation of sweaty clothes throughout her whole body, for her eyes had zeroed in on his back and on the muscles covered by the fitting tank top he was wearing. The way they flexed and relaxed as he paced in front of the recruits was probably the most tantalizing view she had seen in forever.

Before she could stop it, a low moan tore from her throat. It was sudden and unexpected and all she could do was slap a hand over her mouth.

The incriminatory sound hadn’t been loud enough for everyone to hear, but Natasha was sitting right beside her and she  _had_ heard. The smirk that blossomed on her face was proof enough that Lara hadn’t been as subtle as she had hoped.

“You know?” Natasha hummed, leaning her chin on Lara’s shoulder. “It’s entertainingly sweet, the crush you have on Clint. It truly burns your whole KGB-agent façade to  _dust_.” She chuckled in her friend’s ear and then kissed her cheek.

“Fuck off, Nasha.” The tone of Lara’s voice pretended irritation, but both girls knew that was a game, the same game they had been playing ever since they had met at the Academy.

Natasha let out a low laughter and suddenly, her body wasn’t leaning against hers anymore. When Lara turned her head to the side, she saw the woman leaning back on her elbows as she stretched her legs forward, crossing one ankle above the other.

“Hush, Goncharova,” she smirked. “Is this how you thank your friend for hooking you up with her partner?”

“‘Hook up’,” Lara huffed, imitating her friend’s voice unsurprisingly well. “You still decided to walk in on him giving me head as the stubborn cockblock you are.”

Natasha’s smirk was one that denoted deep knowledge of her fellow spy’s antics–of how she worked, how she teased, of the games she used to play when her targets let their guard down. She had witnessed Lara’s charm bring men and women alike to their knees before she stroke the last hit, and she had found herself in that situation, too, once, although it hadn’t been as deadly. “I know you were going to stop  _there_ and you know it, too. You’ve always enjoyed playing with them until they begged, haven’t you? And for how often you could get off with Barton’s name on your lips, you still want to push this decade-old tension to its limits now that you’ve been given the chance, just to see how it goes.”

Larisa shook her head and after a moment’s indecision, she returned her attention to the two Avengers lecturing the rookies. Rogers was talking, delivering what she was sure was Fury’s speech–or verbose list of rules and prohibitions, the same they had uselessly tried to subject her to–, and she cocked her head to the side when her gaze drifted down to his ass, unabashedly outlined by the stealth of his suit, something Barton had decided to leave inside his closet.

Captain America was magnificently big: tall as a trunk, with large shoulders, narrow hips, thick thighs–probably even sturdier ego, she thought with a giggle. But even from the seven-meter distance, she could see the veins in Hawkeye’s arms and she was… lost. It was like being a teenager back in the Red Room, on the rare occasions where they forced her and the other girls to spar against male KGB agents to polish and refine their training. God, how many nights Natasha had spent with her in the darkness of their dorm, gushing and giggling because they weren’t used to all that testosterone, to all those male bodies they couldn’t have…

“Yeah, you’re right,” she eventually admitted as she looked up until she was focusing on the side of the very face that plagued her lonely nights. She wasn’t one to let herself go to such desires: she had been brought up a spy, a killer, an instrument of manipulation, and she knew better than that. She knew better than to let someone into her mind and underneath her skin because she knew all too well what that brought to–she had been, in fact, delivering that same treatment to her targets ever since day one and just because SHIELD now owned her ass, it didn’t mean that she was going to change the very core of her strategy. “I’m going to push  _him_  to his limits.”

There was a mischievous grin on her face when she turned her head to look at her friend and she wasn’t surprised to see it mirrored on Nasha’s lips. They knew each other like the back of their very own hand, knew all the details in the other’s body and soul like they knew those of their favorite weapon, and it was no surprise to them to see that, even after all those years, they were still on the same page.

“Was his mouth game that good?” Natasha wanted to know, pushing herself back up from the floor to sit up straight next to her.

Lara let out a low, dreamy hum as her eyes drifted closed and her chin tilted upwards. “Remember when I told you that you were an eight?”

“Lamest bluff of your life, I guess.”

She chuckled. “Well, Agent Barton is a  _nine_.”

Natasha gasped, but Lara was too engrossed in her own memories to even care.

 

*

 

_His touch was starved as he pushed her into a bathroom and his insistence prevented her from looking around and check if the place was indeed as empty as they were hoping it to be. Lara wasn’t complaining, not when he was kissing her like that, almost as if he wanted to make her forget her very name._

_Not that he wasn’t succeeding, be it clear. It didn’t happen often, for she never let anyone kiss her like that. And the fact that no one had ever been that passionate with her out of their own free will made it all a thousand times better._

_It was like being back in Chișinău all over again when he had almost brought her to her knees with his lips and tongue on her body. She felt him pressing himself against her, his fingers bruising on her thigh, the one exposed by the slit in the silk of her dress, as he seemed to want to squeeze it to the bone. She felt his breath against her skin as the kiss deepened to a clash of lips and teeth, both too desperate to slow it down–or to take it slow altogether._

_He grunted when her hands sneaked their way around his neck and then up into his hair. She tugged on it, lightly scratching his scalp as she did so, and suddenly they were staring into each other’s eyes, breaths mingling and lips still touching and the sight of his clouded eyes with their pupils blown wide made her moan. The sound seemed to tear its way out of her very soul as she tugged on his hair once again and it got mirrored by Clint’s second grunt as he took her lower lip between his teeth and pulled on it in the most gentle of ways._

_He drove her silly. He had been plaguing her memories for so long–_ so long _–that it all felt surreal now. His bruising lips, his selfish hands, that hard-on of his she felt against her belly as he pushed himself against her… It felt all like a dream, as cliché as that could sound. She had never been given the privilege of having lovers, and she had denied herself of that chance even after the rules she had grown up with had ceased to exist. She could have had anyone she wanted and she could have had it without manipulation. She had never acted on it, though, she had never given herself the chance to be something more than the hound she was. And to be in the situation where that eventuality could materialize a body of its own, even just for one night, was far more than her affection-starved and love-deprived brain could endure._

_“Tell me to stop,” Clint muttered next to her ear as he smothered the skin of her cheek in wet and sloppy kisses. He was panting against her and the harshness of his breathing turned deeper when his hands finally slipped underneath her dress._

_Lara chuckled: it was almost like they were reliving that Moldovan night all over again, acting the improvised script they had played that time once more. It felt almost cozy, it gave her a sense of safety she hadn’t known she’d needed now that this man could play with her bare vulnerability as he pleased._

_She wasn’t going to let him stop, though, not now that he had finally acted on his instincts and desires after having spent the whole night staring at her flirting with his friend. “Please, no,” she breathed back, turning her head to the side to catch his lips for another kiss._

 

*

 

Clint saw the change in Larisa’s eyes more quickly than he would have had Natasha not taught him how to read that woman. He saw the smile on her face fade into her usual inexpressive façade and the tension return to her shoulders as she straightened her back as she snapped out of her reverie.

He smirked at her when their gazes met and he was both pleased and surprised to see her answer back with the same expression.

“She’s a level one,” the insolent rookie he had felt like punching in the face ever since the introductive meeting with Maria Hill that morning repeated. “She should be training with us.”

No one spoke and in the silence of the room, he stared as Lara stood up, followed closely by Natasha, who was more than ready to catch her friend if she decided she truly did not want to stand such an idiot and was pleased to see her walk towards his group. She had an almost catlike stroll in her step and she made sure to take her sweet time to reach the center of the training room just so that  _everyone_  could see and  _feel_  the strength her whole demeanor revealed.

“What’s your name?” she asked and Clint couldn’t help himself but smirk at the thought of what could happen.

The blonde newbie, twice the size of agent Goncharova, took a step back, but did his best to keep the impassible expression on his face and, in his stupidity, he should have been recognized such guts. “Agent Jethro Freeman.”

“He calls himself ‘agent’,” Larisa snickered, head turning slightly to the side to glance at Nat. She stretched her neck to the side before opening her chest a little more to intensify the stretch. “I remember how our insolence got punished, do you?”

Natasha nodded and grinned at Clint, almost as if she wanted to tell him to trust her and her friend on this one and not to intervene. “Sight, hearing and movement deprivation.”

Goncharova’s smile seemed to mirror a past memory as she heaved a long breath. “It gets scary, after a while. At first, it’s fun, it’s something new, and you don’t have to hear all the girls you live with. But after a while…” She shrugged her shoulders, gaze wandering around the room. Her legs had opened a little wider, almost as though she was readying herself to lunge forward, and the longer he stared at her, the more Clint felt the unbearable need to touch her. “Your own heartbeat drives you crazy.”

“‘No acts of intimidation towards fellow agents’,” Freeman stated. “It’s in the regulations.”

“You see, this is the difference between a nobody like you and a global threat like me.” Larisa took a step forward and stopped right before the rookie. “People like me are going to kill people like you because you simply  _do not know_  how to keep your mouth shut. I’m a level-one agent simply because Fury fears me too much to give me access to SHIELD’s databases and intel,  _not_  because I’m a washout like you. I could defeat you with my eyes closed and my ears stuffed because, unlike you, I  _am_  an agent, and more than that, I’m someone who knows how to do her job.”

They all saw and heard Jethro Freeman swallow, and the sound he made as his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down was almost louder than it normally would have been in the silence of the training room.

“You’re here to learn and to train,” she went on and Clint saw Natasha move a hand on Lara’s shoulder to keep her grounded. Unlike what he had expected, that sudden touch didn’t startle Larisa Goncharova and he wondered whether she  _truly_  had the ability to be aware of anything surrounding her or if she simply expected such a gesture from her friend. “And I am surely not here to kill you and risk having our annoying director up my ass. You want to train with me? Come back when you learn how to think with your brain and not your prick.”

She never lost her cool. Even when the rookie’s insolence forced her to her feet, she never lost her unreadable expression. Not even  _Clint_  had mastered that ability so well and it was something that went beyond even Nat’s stoic façade. It made him want her more and he wondered who was more stupid: he or the rookie that had thought he could challenge someone like the Mantis.

“But since you seem like you want to see how a  _real_  enemy agent fights, I guess I’ll give you a demo. I usually don’t do this because…” She sighed and lowered her shoulder until Natasha got the message and removed her hand. “Well, because I tend to  _kill_  insolence, but today’s your lucky day.” She then turned toward Steve, throwing a grin at Clint as her gaze wandered to find the new object of her attention. “Is that alright with you,  _Captain_?” She stressed the word as if to tease him and took a step in their direction.

Steve nodded in agreement, taking a step back and showing her the sparring mat with the movement of his arm. “You choose who you want to face.”

Walking past him and Clint, the grin on her face stretched wider as she gracefully moved to stand on the ring defined by the thin, black mat positioned in the center of the room. The sprint in her step was now lighter, Clint noticed, and the muscles in her back, whose movements he could see through her sweaty tank top, had lost any trace of tension. She was in her element and everyone in their right mind would have noticed that. And they would have  _stopped_. She was the beast preparing for the upcoming attack and she seemed to savor the moment as the adrenaline intoxicatingly ran through her veins.

“Don’t take it personally, Nasha,” she hummed when she found a spot she liked on the mat and turned to face the group of both recruits and Avengers. “I’m not picking you since we’ve spent the afternoon throwing punches at each other. You know, I know your moves and you know mine, so it gets boring after a while.”

Nat chuckled. “I was thinking of going out to have fun anyway,” she winked, following her friend’s script.

“And I’m not going to risk and hurt our golden Steve since I sort of have an unspoken agreement with his bionic pal and I would  _hate_  to fight him again, since he knows how to be a pain in the ass,” Lara went on. They all frowned at those words, for neither Clint nor Steve had known Bucky and Larisa shared some kind of past. Probably Nat knew, but considering the light crack in the imperturbability of her face, Clint doubted it to be the case. “So I guess I’m picking a fight with Hawkeye.”

Right then, when her eyes met his, Clint knew it was all a game. That was  _her_  trying to tease  _him_  and while she was also giving him the chance to  _not_ follow her lead in this wicked dance of hers, he still wanted to see where all of the subtle flirting they had kept up since the end of Tony’s party took them.

“Sounds fair,” he agreed. “Want me to take my shoes off?” She was barefoot, the top of her feet reddened probably during her training session with Nat.  _Again_ , it only seemed fair to be on the same level, also seen as this was just a demonstration and not a real fight against a real enemy.

Just as the thought popped up in his mind, he knew, then and there, that she would still kick his ass even in the case where he had the upper hand. And what thrilled him the most was knowing that he would let her do and that he would let her win. It was a sick wish for defeat, the one that prompted a shiver down his spine and straight to his loins, and the second thing he suddenly became aware of, was realizing that she did indeed have him wrapped around her pinkie as Nat had said at that damn party.

Lara shrugged her shoulders and, unfathomed to him, Natasha chuckled. “I don’t know,  _Clint_ ,” she drawled out, savoring his name on her tongue and winking at him. “I’m used to fighting men naked and I wouldn’t mind doing it now, but I’m not sure this is the time nor the place for such a show.”

He clenched his teeth, for he knew what she was trying to do and he wasn’t sure he wanted her to stop. Eyes fixed on her, he kicked his shoes off and bent to free himself of his socks.

Larisa Goncharova was, according to her classified file, ‘intoxicating’. She knew the shortcuts to people’s weaknesses, she knew how to play them, how to wiggle her way straight to the center of their minds. There was nothing she didn’t use to reach her target and her body was perfect for her strategy. Whether she had based it around herself or shaped her whole being to become the deadly weapon it was, Clint didn’t know and he probably didn’t even care.

She was intoxicating and it felt like that was the only thing that mattered in the whole world. The playfulness in her stance, the half-grin on her face, the sparkling amusement in her eyes, her every curve put on display by the form-fitting clothes she wore that day… It was all playing against him and he knew it. He knew it and he let her play her game. Was it reckless of him? Most likely. But a look at her and he was lost.

He met her in the center of the mat and forced himself into a defensive stance, guard up high to protect his face from the blows he knew she’d deliver–just like Hungary all over again. “Ladies first,” he said with a chuckle.

Her laughter was unexpected as she moved. She seemed to dance on the mat, her weight in the balls of her feet as she moved to guard herself. It was like a match between a heavyweight and a lightweight–and not in the strict sense of the term. His technique was what was heavy, while she looked like a ballerina on stage, weight light and movements delicate. A butterfly against a boar. “It’s always nice to know I still fool men into believing I  _am_  a lady.”

Clint got almost distracted by her amused sigh, by her head turning to the side to shoot Natasha a grin. It was only thanks to a last-second sensation that he managed to block her hook and he met her punch with a grunt, but was too slow at reacting and her hand slipped from his grasp like water.

She moved on the mattress, still light and swift, movements carefree and calculated at the same time. The mere sight of her dancing around him like that stirred something inside him and he knew, on the spot, that he was  _fucked_.

Another chuckle ringed in his ears and only then did he avert his gaze from the movement of her bare feet and met hers. “You gonna attack,  _agent_?” She grinned, lips teasing and pearly teeth threatening. “Or you gonna let a  _lady_  do all the  _hard_ work?”

Clint lunged forward for a reverse, but his movement was too thoughtless and she saw it coming even before he jumped into action. She dodged his fist and performed half a pirouette to move away from him, grin always stretching her lips.

He couldn’t explain himself how she could still be this reactive after the hard fight he had seen her put up with Nat just before the rookies entered the training room. It made him wonder whether she was human and if she was, in what percentage. Even the blind could see her unfaltering speed, her steady strength. She could go on like that forever and everybody around them was aware of it.

Evening out his breath, Clint tried to do what Nat had started to explain him at that infamous party: study Larisa’s stance, the look in her eyes, the smile on her face to foresee her next move. And while Natasha had managed to do just that in Hungary, he failed. Pivoting on his heel, he went for another hook, one that only managed to brush against strands of hair that had escaped Lara’s hairdo.

She seemed to dance around his body, so close he could almost feel her heat. “ _Faster_ , Clint,” she whispered, so low only he could hear. She slapped the back of his head and he turned around, but she wasn’t there anymore. “This is my favorite kind of foreplay,” she murmured again, lips brushing against the shell of his ear before she ducked under his blow.

Whether he had been quicker this time or she - slower, Clint didn’t know and part of him fooled himself into thinking he was gaining the upper hand when it was, in fact, just part of her game.

Then, right when he least expected it, she swung her leg into a roundhouse kick and he only caught her ankle in his hand at the last moment, her foot a breath away from kicking his side. She grinned and let him straighten her leg before he took a quick step forward, yanking her in his direction as he came to a stop chest-to-chest. She surprised him by hooking her leg around his waist then and more than a rookie whistled.

Lara leaned forward and her lips grazed his cheek. “Just like on that plane, eh?” Her nose nuzzled the skin behind his ear and Clint had to stop his hips from bucking forward. “I can feel you against me and I am  _soaking wet_.”

 

*

 

_After much begging and grunting on their part, Fury had eventually consented to fly out a small private plane to fetch agents Barton and Romanoff and their prisoner in Budapest. And if SHIELD director’s reticence in giving him and his partner just that one comfort hadn’t soured Clint’s mood enough, the playful banter that had been going on for two days straight between Natasha and Larisa Goncharova had proved to be just the cherry on top of that fatigue-tasting cake._

_Sprawled out on one of the luscious leather seats as the plane flew over Europe, Clint Barton could feel every single bruise marking his skin and his muscles scream in sore agony. And while it had been far easier to handcuff her than he would have ever thought possible, the hand-to-hand combat against the Mantis had exceeded even his wildest thoughts._

_“You should move to the other seat,” Larisa said suddenly and his eyes flew open with the same speed of a snail. He was tired–and even more than that, he was physically and mentally exhausted. All he wanted to do was sleep, much like Nat was doing, curled up like a cat on one of the front armchairs. “Stretch out just right.”_

_“I’m just fine right where I am,” he groaned, turning his head to stare outside the window as they cruised over Austria._

_From the corner of his eye–for he was_ not _going to lose sight of her–he saw her smirk. “Do as you please, then,_ Clint _. I was just suggesting you take some well-deserved rest after I kicked your ass.”_

 _“You’re a prisoner, you should keep your mouth shut.” Shut around his dick, he thought, and he shifted in his seat. He was_ not _going back to Moldova all over again. All he had to do was deliver her to Fury and get her out of his system like the poison she was._

 _Just then, her foot teased his ankle before moving up and down his shin. He shifted again, moving his leg back and slightly more out of her reach, despite not being able to do so completely given the cramped space between them. “Oh, I’m just fine where I am,” she mocked him, moaning lowly as she made herself more comfortable against the back of the seat. “Are you sure_ I _am the prisoner, anyway?”_

_The smirk on her lips made him snap. “Keep your mouth shut.”_

_She moaned again and her eyelids seemed to grow heavier as she lowered them enough to tease him with her gaze. “I love it when they’re bossy.” She said so in Russian and it made him gulp, for he indeed spoke that language. “I wanted to thank you for Chișinău,” she started again after endless minutes of silence, just when Clint had started to feel himself doze off to sleep. “Truly rid me of any trace of fatigue.”_

_He groaned: the bump on the back of his head still throbbed insistently at times, even if the uncomfortable feeling had positively diminished over the past two weeks. “Glad I could be of help.”_

_He had just closed his eyes when he felt her move and when he reopened them again to stare at her, she was sitting closer to the edge of her seat, her knees lazily settled between his wide thighs._

_“You just have to say it,” she murmured, handcuffed hands moving to his thighs and slowly sliding closer to his crotch. “And I’ll do it.”_

_Clint was suddenly and completely awake, then, no trace of tiredness in his mind or his limbs. He felt himself stir in his pants but still did his best to ignore the feeling. “I’ve already said it: shut your mouth.”_

_It was impossible to wipe that smartass smile from her lips and he had to resign himself to that realization. He should change his game, he thought, change his behavior toward her: stop paying attention to her tricks, stop letting her play with his mind and his body._

_She asked him to use the restroom, then, voice polite and sickeningly sweet, almost as though she wanted to make fun of him. Clint looked her up and down, trying to convince himself of how bad an idea that was, and sighed. He stood up and pulled her to her feet by grabbing the chain between the handcuffs she wore._

_“Such a gentleman,” she whispered in his ear as she walked past him, brushing against the side of his body._

_He scoffed and stopped just before the door of the toilet. There was no way he was going to resist until their arrival in New York. He was either going to fuck her senseless or kill her, and he wasn’t so sure the second option was that bad._

_Before he had the time to answer Larisa’s call, the sliding door opened again and she stared at him. “These nice bracelets need to go, I’m having problems with my pants.”_

_He grunted, rolling his eyes and crossing his arms over his chest. His weight shifted to rest on one leg as his hip slightly pressed to the side. “You need a hand?”_

_“I wouldn’t mind one,” she smirked. She was eyeing him just as she knew every little thing going on in his mind and Clint couldn’t stand it._

_Then, before he could react, she pulled him into the cramped space of the toilet and they ended up being pressed into each other. One of his legs ended up pushing between hers and she smiled a knowing grin when his uncomfortable erection made itself known against her thigh._

_“Nice gear I feel against my leg,” she drawled into his ear as she pressed herself against his side. “I’m starting to think you need to use the restroom more than I.” Her lips skimmed along the line of his jaw and all he managed to force himself to do was clench his teeth, her tied hands taking a hold of his side–one on the side of his chest and the other on his back._

_“You should hurry up,” he swallowed, hands unwillingly moving to her hips to keep her in place._

_He knew better than this. Why he always acted like a horny teen with her was truly beyond him, but still, he wasn’t sure he wanted to stop._

_She ground against his thigh then and against any kind of training he ever received, he inhaled sharply, eyes drifting closed. All he could feel was her–her hot core against his clad leg, his arm pressing into the valley of her breasts, her warm breath against the skin of his face and neck as she lazily kissed his jaw and the sensitive skin under his ear. Then, unexpectedly, she whimpered and he felt himself come just as unexpectedly in his pants._

_“So good,” she hummed against his cheek, kissing it lightly before she pushed him out of the toilet. “Now give me a moment.”_

_It took him a couple of minutes to realize she had stolen the keys to her handcuffs right out of the back pocket of his pants._

 

*

 

The next encounter Larisa had with Clint happened a week after the events in the training room.

In nothing but panties and a satin nightgown, she sat in front of the jet-black grand piano in the middle of her sunny penthouse living room and she was trying to ease the discomfort of her past on the notes of  _Nero’s Nocturne_. Ever since she was a kid, gentle music had always helped to soothe the harsh angles of her memories or of her days. Fighting against the blaring metal music blasting from the television, she was forcing the piano notes to war against the loud cries of the Red Room, mitigating the thirst for Todorovsky’s blood that had plagued both waking and sleeping hours in the last few days.

Auditory overload. It was something they had subjected her and the other girls to at the Academy with the goal to sharpen their focus skills: when their heartbeat became the loudest sound in the training room, they could leave. She had mastered it. She had been  _forced_  to if she wanted to survive.

Despite her training being over–and it had been over for ages now–, she still submitted herself to that technique, for it was the only thing that helped her mind find its peace.

It had never been that hard to push the music of her piano to overcome that of the television, though, and the reason had a name: Hawkeye. He distracted her from her target, he dulled the precision of her aim, and the thoughts of him inevitably brought her mind back to the only scar on her body and hence, to Todorovsky.

No man had ever been the cause of such faltering in her self-control, and it was both enticing and frightening. She had managed to live without such a distraction her whole life, and this was why she had managed to take down her targets the way she had. But it was almost ten years now from her first encounter with Clint Barton and he had managed to become her weakness. Whether she showed it or not, it didn’t matter, for the terror the idea of falling in love with–or worse, of having  _already_ fallen for–him was what kept her on edge day in and day out.

The way he walked, the way he talked, the way he smirked, fought, drew his bow,  _looked at her_ … It all felt calculated: it was almost as though he knew what she liked and exploited his knowledge to mold himself and attract her into his trap.

She grunted, fists smashing on the keys on the piano, causing a nightmarish cry to win against the deafening music coming from the switched-on television. She punched the keyboard again, biting her tongue to keep that scream from tearing her whole being apart, as all her muscles tensed and her body leaned forward.

Three things happened almost at once, then: a foreign sound from behind caught her ear; her hand closed itself around the grip of the gun sat on the flat surface of the piano; the TV switched off.

Lara turned around in her seat, gun aiming in the general direction of the sound she had heard, a finger automatically taking the safety off and the other moving over the trigger. She smirked, though, when she saw Tony Stark staring at her, TV remote still in his hand.

“You should be thankful I go by the rule of ‘ask first, shoot later’ in my own house,” she said, standing up and putting the safety of the gun back on. She stuck the weapon into the elastic band of her panties and closed the piano. “I don’t take trespassing lightly, though, I’m afraid.”

“He’s with us,” came Natasha’s voice. “Clint and me,” she continued when Lara cocked an eyebrow.

She caught Clint’s eye then and the look he gave her would have made her shudder hadn’t she been who she was. She allowed herself to blatantly stare at him anyway, though. He was wearing his stealth suit, just like Nat, and she found herself almost moaning at the thought of him tearing her nightgown apart dressed in Hawkeye’s typical attire.

And she knew he was staring, too. His gaze swiped down the length of her legs and then back up, to the thin material of the nightgown swooshing in the afternoon breeze that came in through the open windows. She could feel her nipples bead both in the chilly air and under his burning gaze, and he swallowed–slow, and hard, and almost painfully.

Just then, Iron Man cleared his throat. “If you’re done eye-fucking each other…”

“I could I fuck you, too, if only I wanted,” she grinned, walking past him to close the French windows that opened onto the huge terrace she had bought that penthouse for. “ _Shokoladny soldat_  is turning me into a nun,” she chuckled.

“Fury?” Nasha asked with a chuckle just to then open up into a real laughter when Lara nodded. “You’re nuts.”

“We don’t have the whole day.”

“What’s burning under your ass?” Lara asked, frowning at Stark, who had the audacity to start and act as lord and master of her place.

“We got a mission we should be leaving for.”

She shrugged and took the gun from her hip to rest it on the glass surface of the coffee table. “You need me to hold your hand and tell you it’s all going to be fine? What, mommy didn’t reassure you enough? I might be into roleplay, but this…” She chuckled. “Not gonna work.”

“I truly don’t see why you had to push Fury to make us bring her along,” he said then, head turning towards Natasha.

Disbelief and confusion flashed across her features, but Clint was the only one to see her ever changing expression. She didn’t notice it, though, engrossed as she was in questioning Nasha with her gaze.

“We’re going to Italy. Stop-an-auction-and-catch-the-bad-guy kind of mission,” she explained, eyeing the gun her friend had discarded a few minutes before. “Got a guy I’m sure you remember, that’s why I not-so-gently asked for you to be assigned on a real undercover mission.”

“Who’s the man?”

A smirk. Pure, unadulterated cruelty flashed in Natasha’s eyes. “Todorovsky.”

 

*

 

_Waking up felt like drowning._

_Head heavy, lungs burning, body weightless and massive at the same time._

_Sounds and breaths and heartbeats mingled together into a cacophony that pushed her into a downward spiral of throbbing agony._

_Waking up felt like being electrocuted with thorough pain. The pulsing ache spread through her every muscle and bone like a maddening poison, forcing her body to tense like a bowstring, toes curling, nails biting into the flesh of her palms._

_It took Larisa_ hours _to swim her way back up to the surface, to remember how she had ended up in that cold and uncomfortable bed, to understand why her body felt like shutting down against the onslaught of excruciating pain._

 _They had collected her from her dorm in the middle of the night–_ which _night, she truly didn’t know, she couldn’t remember it, not now that her brain’s fight against the throbbing feeling made her stiff. She had been transported to an unknown location and handed into the hands of men she had never seen._

Graduation  _was a word she had often dreamed of. An essential rite of passage in the hierarchy of the Red Room’s student corpus. Natasha had gone through it not long before she did and ever since that day, they had moved her out of the Academy, sent her into the real world. Larisa had only dreamed of going through the same ceremony, whose trials were guarded with the same intensity of a state secret._

_First had come hand-to-hand combat. Twelve men she had to take down, one after the other. She had endured blow after blow and she had fought back with the same intensity, polishing her technique with every opponent she knocked out. Moving around gracefully and swiftly, she had poured ballet into her combat strategy and had managed to pass the first test._

_Auditory overload had come second. Closed in a dimly lit room, the KGB deafened her with howling dogs, with crying children, honking cars, shooting machine guns. And under all that confused noise, a subtle voice that repeated the same four words over and over again in a murmured litany she had to do her best to pick up._ Верность Партии – Верность Родине  _– Loyalty to the party, loyalty to the motherland. Sixteen minutes, forty-two seconds, seventeen milliseconds – the second-best time of the agency, just after the man that went under the name of_ Зимний солдат _. No one ever told her so, though, not even the Winter Soldier when she eventually met him, for no initiate got to know their time._

 _The third test was what the Academy called ‘partial sensory deprivation’. Hearing, sight and movement had to go for a specific amount of time. It was something she had mastered in her years of training, for she didn’t take well submission, nor dictatorship, not to talk about regulations. She had found herself in the sensory-deprivation room more times than she could recall and what had to be a punishment had slowly turned into one of the arts she was better at. She had learned how to slow down the rhythm of her heart, how to even out her breathing when her whole body started to tingle with the need to move and see and hear and_ scream _. Despite her mind always being vigilant, she knew how to relax under the constraints of the trial._

_She got out of the room with a smile on her face._

_Much easier was the fourth examination, for it involved the angency’s standard batch of foreign languages–English, German, Italian, French, Romanian, Arabic. She had mastered them, like everyone at the Academy, even though at varying degrees. The low intensity of the test was just the rest before the last part of the initiation, but it still prolonged the varying intensity of the whole ordeal to test candidates’ stress endurance. More important than what all the tests examined was, in fact, the person’s ability to withstand lack of sleep, constant forced concentration, and overall mental and physical resistance._

_Therefore, all languages were tested thoroughly. Casual and formal conversations were tested almost at once, and Lara was forced to shift from one registry to the other and from one language to the other without warning._

_She thought she had it. She could taste her success on the tip of her tongue, she could feel it pouring ecstatic excitement into every fiber of her being._

_The fifth trial was killing. And more than that, it was torture. And if candidates could do it on loved ones, they would never have problems doing it on strangers. Lara’s examination had to be performed on her mother. What she did to her then would plague her sleep from months to come and she would only find freedom and comfort in the discovery of her mother’s secret: the billion roubles she had been paid with as a thank-you note for selling her daughter._

_It all came back slowly to Lara. And the more she squeezed her eyes to put the ceiling of the room she was in back into focus, the more details popped up in her memory._

_The kick she had received in her back._

_The blood she had tasted in her mouth when one of the agents she fought with slapped her cheek hard._

_The congratulations of the KGB examiner upon her passing initiation._

_And then, a phantom-like face among all those memories: Todorovsky, the surgeon in charge of sterilization._

*

 

The five-star hotel bedroom was amazing, the view on Lake Como was even more. Water, mountains, trees–it made the idea of embarking on this mission a little more bearable. What he enjoyed the most, though, was the place’s tranquillity. Up there, in that hotel that gave on the lake, Clint almost felt himself at home.

“We should get some sleep,” Lara’s voice pulled him out of his contemplation as he leaned against the balustrade of the balcony. “It’s probably going to be a long night.”

“I’ll take the couch.” There was no way both in heaven and hell he’d lie down beside someone like her. She was already in his mind and underneath his skin, he truly didn’t need her  _that_  close.

“Don’t be stupid.” She scoffed, taking off her shoes by pulling on them with her feet before undressing until she stood there in matching white bra and panties. “If we have to play this cliché part of husband and wife, you might as well get used to sleeping next to me.” She smirked then, plopping down onto the four-poster bed and sighing in delight. “I wouldn’t mind it if you slept  _with_  me, but I’m sure we’ll get there in due time.”

While the general plan had been Steve’s idea, it had been because of  _her_  that he found himself in that room. She had excluded partnering up with Steve, for he was almost a celebrity, just as she had said no to Bucky–too risky since Todorovsky and his former KGB and current friends knew about the Winter Soldier. Nat hadn’t even been considered, for everybody knew Black Widow stood with SHIELD, unlike Larisa, who had done anything in her power to keep the status of her affiliations on ‘unknown’.

Instead, she had personally chosen him.  _There are only three people I trust on this jet_ , she had said as they were landing.  _One is yours truly, the second is Nasha, and the third is Clint Barton. And since she’s not a possible option, I’m going with dear Hawkeye_.

“We should talk about the mission, instead,” he pointed out, re-entering the room and closing the French window behind his back. He considered laying down on the bed–for a moment, he truly considered such an option. He was tired from the flight, he had a mild headache and a more than mild need to sleep with her as she had not-so-blatantly proposed. Ever since their fighting demonstration, things had gone to shit: she was always– _always_ –among his thoughts and he felt like he’d never be able to get her out if he didn’t act on his impulses.

She hummed and he stared as she took a deep breath, her eyes closed, ankles crossed and hands on her tummy. “What is there to talk about?  _Steve_ ,” and she stressed his friend’s name, “already went over the plan so many times that now I almost think I’m truly married to you.”

He swallowed and it was then that he realized the thin layer of cold sweat covering the palms of his hands. “We should go over the details,” he retorted. Like when we got married, how long we have known each other, where we met,  _how_  we met, who I am.  _How you like sex_. “To make it more credible.”

Lara sighed and she opened her eyes to stare at him. “First of all, you’re playing my husband, so stop avoiding my tits. Nasha gave me a pretty revealing dress and I– _we_ –can’t afford you being a prude with your  _wife_.”

He considered biting back, but instead thought that playing her game could benefit  _everything_ –the mission and whatever it was that still lingered between them. He let his eyes gaze down from her face and focused on the lace of her bra. He could see her nipples.

“Second of all,” she went on with a smirk on her lips when she saw what the focus of his attention was, “just follow my lead. I know Todorovsky and the majority of his guests.  _Plus_  I’ve already been in this particular villa, so I know my way around.”

“Why didn’t you-”

“Reveal my secrets?” She chuckled. “I told you. I only trust two people apart from me: Nasha and you. I might work for Fury and now for your Scooby-gang of superheroes, but I’m not risking compromising  _my_ mission.” She stood up on her knees then and crawled over to where he was standing at the foot of the bed. Her fingers hooked in the belt holes of his jeans, into which he had changed before exiting the quinjet, and she tugged on them. “Nor my chances of getting laid by you.”

It was astonishing, the way she let known the fact that she wanted him. It surely was part of her usual strategy, but good Lord, the things it did to him! He was always there, thinking he was finally a step ahead of her, and the second after he found himself on his ass as she opened that sinning mouth of hers. It wasn’t like he didn’t want that, it wasn’t that he didn’t want to take her on that damn bed, rather, it was the way she said she wanted it and the way his body and his mind reacted to her words. His mind went blank and all blood seemed to rush to his loins.

“Do I make you wet?” he decided to tease.

He truly didn’t think it would fire back. He probably should have expected it, but the truth was, he didn’t. Her hand trailed down her body and it disappeared into her panties. His lungs seemed like they had been caught in a grip as he stared into her eyes.

“Oh, yes, indeed,” she confirmed after a couple of seconds, hand still teasingly moving inside her lingerie. It was then that he noticed the faint, horizontal scar just above the hem of her panties. “Look, I’ll tell you the basics,” she continued then, returning serious, “but we will be together the whole night. You have nothing to worry about that’s not pretending you love me like more than some head you’ve given in a bathroom.”

With a sigh, he resigned to her will. And three hours later, when it was too late to pull back and find someone that could replace him, he found himself staring at the glimmering lights of Bellagio reflecting on the placid waters of the lake.

He was doing anything in his power not to think of the glimmery golden dress Lara was wearing and even less of the fact that she didn’t wear a bra. He was all in for the lovebirds-undercover kind of plan, but he wasn’t sure that was a good idea with the past–and present–he already shared with her.

“You got your earpiece in?” He sensed her behind him even before she spoke, breath warm behind his ear as she pressed a light kiss to the side of his neck.

“Sure.”

He felt her take it out from his ear, then, before she chirped a ‘sorry, guys, end of transmissions’ and let it fall to the ground. He didn’t manage to stop her in time: her golden jewel sandal had already stepped onto it, crushing it. “What?” she shrugged when he glared at her. “We can’t risk anything. Moreover,” she added, taking his hand in hers and guiding him toward the entrance of the villa, “it’s a two-night event. Todorovsky will join his guests on the last night and on the last night only.”

They got quiet when they came too close to the entrance and the gorillas that guarded it. Smiles on their faces, they stopped right before them and Lara handed them their invitation.

“ _Bogomol_ ,” one of the two men muttered, reading the invitation again and then gazing up at Lara. “ _Izvestnyj bogomol?_ ”

Clint saw her roll her eyes before her fingers came up to her mouth. She pulled on the lower lip, showed the  _БГМЛ_  she had tattooed there and flashed a grin when excitement bubbled up on the two men’s faces.

Then they pointed at Clint. “ _Drug_?” they smirked, eyes evil.

“ _Muzh_ ,” she retorted, turning to press a kiss on Clint’s cheek.

They let them pass, and Lara guided him across a crowd of seemingly wealthy people and to the open bar. “Two vodkas,” she ordered in Russian and then turned to him. “I also chose you because your Russian is sexy,” she smiled. It was a half-code for ‘you’re the only one besides Nasha that I trust when it comes to Russian,’ something she used to elude the curious stares of the people leaning around the bar.

“Glad you chose your husband based on his knowledge of languages,” he smirked, taking the shots the barista left near them and handing one to Lara. “You’re stunning tonight,” and she truly was. Dressed to the feet in gold, with a neckline that ended right in the middle of the valley of her breasts, she looked like a goddess.

She downed her vodka and he mirrored her and once he was done, she took his glass and put it down onto the bar with hers. She closed the distance between them, then, and her arms circled around his neck. “We should mingle,” she breathed against his neck, lips trailing along his skin and the underside of his jaw, voice low so that nobody would hear. “Get to know the buyers, collect the intel your people want…” She looked up at him then and pecked his lips. “Find a bathroom I can use to repay your favor.”

There was no time to answer her, for she was already tugging him back through the crowd. Anywhere around them, Russian could be heard and rich people could be seen.

He had expected for people to stop mid-conversation and stare at the woman walking before him as they recognized her, like the two men at the entrance, but no one did. He asked her once the crowd wasn’t as thick as they made their way deeper into the villa.

“Those people are just a cover,” she shrugged, showing her hidden tattoo to yet another guard, who stared at her in disbelief before letting them through the closed door. “The real party is in the other wing of the house, and only people like me,” and she turned to wink at him, “can pass.”

“With that tattoo?” He asked and she nodded. “What does it mean?”

“ _БГМЛ_ ,” she spelled. “ _Bogomol_ , or Mantis. Todorovsky was the first one to call me that and when the time to get my passe-partout came, I used that name. Everybody knew me as the Mantis, so it only seemed easier.”

“Does Nat have it?”

She nodded, flashing the acronym to yet another guard. They walked in silence for a few meters before she spoke again. “ _ЧРВД_. I’m sure you know what it stands for.”

Ten minutes later they both stood in the heart of the real party. The music was a little louder, but not deafening as the one that had given him a headache in Lara’s apartment. There were fewer people, but the ones present looked richer, their clothes of better manufacture, and the place in general looked like out of a Russian palace–or like Moldova all over again.

He shouldn’t have been as shocked to see naked women dancing around, glittery golden dust making their bodies shimmer under the lights of the chandelier, but he truly hadn’t expected something like that. This whole party looked friskier than he had thought it to be.

“The auction,” he decided to ask, following Lara outside, on the balcony. “What are they selling?”

“Things,” she answered, enigmatic amusement twinkling in her eyes. She pulled him closer then, hugged him to pretend like they were dancing to the slow music. “Relics from Russia’s glorious past, weapons,  _people_ …” She nuzzled her face in the crook of his neck, kissed his pulse-point, swiped the flat of her tongue over it.

To anyone watching, it would look like a couple–whatever the roles between the two of them were–taking some liberties in the cool summer air. To Clint, though… He  _wanted_  it to be like that–he truly did want it, against his better judgment and his common sense–, and he couldn’t help the shiver of irritation that ran down his spine as his hands rested on her hips and pulled her closer. “People?” he asked.

She nodded. “Fellow girls from the Red Room were sold in these auctions. Some agents choose this outlet as a way to gain more missions or general visibility. Others,” and she sucked the sweet spot just below his jaw, one hand snaking down between their bodies to palm him over the pants of his tuxedo, “are simply sold for their bodies.”

He gasped when she gently squeezed him and he couldn’t stop himself from leaning his head down to kiss down her neck, inhaling her perfume, the same that had driven him nuts at Tony’s party.

“I hear they’re selling one of Rasputin’s nails,” she revealed after a while. “I’d really like to try my luck with it.”

“We’re not here for fun,” he reminded her and he felt her pout against his skin.

She moved back a little, stared up at him, caressed the sides of his face and then those of his neck. “Tonight we are. I told you: your man will only be here tomorrow night. Today, though, is our chance to get to know the guests, identify the buyers so that you–the good guys–can arrest them or do whatever it is that you do-”

“You’re supposed to be one of the good guys, too,” he pointed out, hands crawling up her bare back, awaking goosebumps on her skin.

Lara’s lips stretched in one of those smirks he loved so much. “Key-word:  _supposed_. I’m neither good nor bad, I’m simply neutral. This is why no one questioned my presence her or my  _sympathies_. I’m the wild card that could screw everyone and everything up. Plus, I have ways to keep my life  _classified_ , and no one knows anything about what I’m doing in America. And I’ll tell you a secret,” she grinned, lowering her voice even more. “Most of the things in my file-”

“It’s classified,” Clint frowned. She had a level-one pass, she shouldn’t have been able to read it.

“I have my ways,” she answered, tilting her head to the side and pressing a kiss on the corner of his lips. “As I was saying, though, many of the things in my file are not even remotely true. Only Nasha could spill my secrets, but she won’t do it, for I wouldn’t tell hers even if I was tortured.”

He looked down at her, scanned her features in search of any trace of a lie. And he didn’t know why he did that: below that lovely-wife façade, he couldn’t see anything else. But he stared at her and his hands slid down her body to rest on her butt. “Tell me one of your secrets?”

She snorted at that and smothered her hands over his hair to fix what the unexpected wind had tousled. “What will I get in change?”

Clint shrugged, making her twirl around when a guest passed by them. He pulled her toward him, her back against his chest, and ground his hard-on against her ass. “Anything.”

He heard her swallow and waited for an answer as her head fell back against his chest, his arms wrapping more tightly around her. “The thing I have for you,” she whispered. “It’s not a strategy. I think I really do like you. And it scares me because it’s never happened before.”

They both swayed at the rhythm of the music in silence then, both enjoying the physical contact with the other, and the calm lake night. They stared at the guests they could see inside the lit hall, the way they moved around each other, read their lips as they talked in hushed Russian, studied their body language.

It took them a while to snap out of their reverie and it was Lara who broke the silence. “You said I could have anything,” she said, turning around in Clint’s arms and staring up at him. “I told you my secret, so it’s only fair I get what you promised.”

“You want me?” he asked, eyes trailing down to her parted lips. He slightly bent to kiss them, tugging on the lower lip as if to tease her tattoo and for a split second he wondered how much it had hurt to get those four letters marked into the sensitive skin.

“I want you,” she confirmed, fingers playing on the back on his neck.

“You want me now?”

She nodded. “I want you now.”

“What about these people? Weren’t you the one saying we should gather intel from them?”

Her hand snaked between their bodies again, but unlike before, it now slipped down his shirt and straight into his pants. In the constraints of his pants, her hand seemed to press deliciously harder against his erection. “The night is still young,  _Clint_ ,” she whispered against his cheek, slowly teasing him with her fingers. “And I’ve been wanting you for almost ten years.”

When they met each other’s gaze again, he could only imagine his pupils to be as blown as hers. His breathing was heavier against the skin of her face, his skin felt hotter, his mind dizzier. “Yeah?” he swallowed.

She removed her hand from his pants and moved him so that he had his back to the hall and the French window that led to the terrace that gave onto the rich gardens of the villa. “Yeah,” she hummed, kneeling down before him.

She was fumbling with the button of his pants and the zipper before he had the time to realize what she was up to. And when he caught up, he had to fight against himself and put a hand on hers. “What are you doing?” He could barely focus, breathing slow and hard, as he felt his heartbeat throb in his loins.

“I’m thanking you for the amazing head you gave me at Stark’s charity bullshit,” she grinned up at him, freeing her hand from his grasp and lowering the zipper. “And this time there’s no Natalya Romanova cockblocking us.”

Terrified of the idea of someone seeing them, Clint stood as still as he could, eyes fixed on the woman knelt between his legs. He stared as she took him out of his briefs, as she gently stroke him, as she smirked at the sight of the angry-red tip of his cock.

“On that plane from Hungary,” she started, lips inching closer to him. “The only thing you had to do, was ask.”

Right then, she kissed his head, pressed her lips against his hot skin, and he could only let out a shuddering breath. He should have done that–he thought–, should have asked for what he wanted. He had taken her in Chișinău and he had taken her at Tony’s party, and in neither occasion had he had her as he wanted.

His mind went blank when she wrapped her lips around him, tongue teasing the head, her hand slowly massaging his base. He had to close his eyes when she hummed lowly around him as she took him deeper into her mouth and he steadied himself by putting his hands on her shoulders to avoid bending his knees.

It was slow, but Clint didn’t mind. He had wanted her so badly, all those years spent fantasizing, and now that he finally had her–or as much of her as she was willing to give–he wanted the moment to last, he wanted to savor it, to remember it.


End file.
